Their hearts sank as they came into the room. They had arrived early but already it was full. A stern-faced woman at a desk by the door gave them a numbered ticket and told them to wait until it was called to see the official record-keeper.

“Why are there so many people?” asked Lotti.

The stern-faced woman looked at her pityingly. “Even now, all this time after the war, half of France is looking for a missing loved one,” she said, “and you are searching for an Englishman!” she added, as if Englishmen were famously the most difficult to find.

All the chairs in the room were occupied. Ben and Lotti shrugged off their rucksacks and found a space on the floor to sit and wait. Lotti stole a look at Ben and was alarmed to see that he was shaking.

“Maybe it won’t be so long,” she said, slipping an arm through his.

“It’s not the wait,” he whispered. “It’s … we’re here …”

“And soon we’ll know,” said Lotti. “Yes. It’s scary.”

Ben sighed and briefly rested his head on her shoulder, then gave himself a shake and reached into his rucksack for the envelope in which he had put Sam’s photograph.

“Take it,” he said, giving it to Lotti. “There’s no sense both of us waiting in here, and your French is better than mine. Go and ask people if they’ve seen him?”

Lotti took the photograph and examined it carefully.

It was a formal shot, taken in a studio before Sam left for the war. He wore an army uniform and his hair was cut very short, but his mouth was twisted in a half-smile, his eyes were crinkled and there was a dimple in his left cheek. The guardians of the orphanage would have had no trouble recognizing the boy they used to define as trouble. “What a laugh!” the face in the picture seemed to say, as if he wanted Ben and Nathan to remember him as he had always been, rather than what he was about to become.

“I like him,” said Lotti.

Ben’s mouth trembled. “So do I.”

“I promise,” said Lotti, “if anyone here remembers Sam, I will find them!”

She hugged him and hurried out of the room.

Ben waited.

There were double doors at the back of the room. As numbers were called, people got up and went through them. All sorts of different people were here. An old farmer in his Sunday best, a woman in a dark silk dress, a young man with a stick. They all went in looking nervous. They never returned smiling.

Lotti started outside the service doors of the hospital, watching the porters unload crates from a truck, feeling strangely nervous and un-Lotti-like, because she remembered the cold hard look on Ben’s face at the river yesterday, and at Nathan’s grave, and she wanted very much to make that look go away.